Omnichannel Commerce Is Broken for Most Brands
Omnichannel commerce is the practice of selling across multiple channels, physical, digital, and social, in a way that creates a consistent and connected customer experience. The goal is not simply to be present everywhere. It is to make sure that every touchpoint, whether a customer discovers you on social, buys on your website, or returns a product in-store, feels like part of the same coherent relationship.
Most brands are not doing this. They are doing multichannel, which is a collection of separate selling environments that happen to share a logo. The gap between the two is where revenue leaks.
Key Takeaways
- Omnichannel commerce and multichannel commerce are not the same thing. Most brands are running the latter and calling it the former.
- The biggest barrier to omnichannel execution is not technology. It is internal structure: teams, data, and incentives that are siloed by channel.
- Inventory and fulfilment integration is the operational foundation. Without it, the customer experience promise breaks down at the moment of purchase.
- Performance marketing alone cannot drive omnichannel growth. Reaching new audiences across channels requires investment above the lower funnel.
- Measurement in omnichannel commerce requires honest approximation, not false precision. Attribution models will always be incomplete.
In This Article
Omnichannel commerce sits at the intersection of go-to-market strategy and operational design. If you are thinking about how your channels connect to your broader growth architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider picture.
Why Most Brands Are Not Actually Omnichannel
I spent a significant part of my agency career managing retail and consumer brand accounts. One thing I noticed consistently was that the word “omnichannel” was used freely in strategy decks but rarely interrogated in practice. Brands would have an e-commerce team, a retail team, a social commerce team, and sometimes a marketplace team, each with its own budget, its own targets, and its own reporting structure. Coordination happened occasionally, usually when something went wrong.
This is not omnichannel. It is channel sprawl with a better name.
True omnichannel commerce requires that customer data flows across channels in real time. It requires that inventory is visible across all fulfilment points. It requires that the experience of browsing on mobile, purchasing on desktop, and collecting in-store does not feel like three different companies. And it requires that the commercial model, how you measure success, does not reward one channel at the expense of another.
The reason most brands fall short is structural, not technical. The technology to connect channels has existed for years. What most organisations lack is the internal alignment to use it. Channel managers protect their numbers. P&L owners resist sharing attribution. IT roadmaps move slowly. And so the customer ends up bearing the cost of internal politics, in the form of inconsistent pricing, duplicated communications, and broken fulfilment experiences.
What Omnichannel Commerce Actually Requires
There are four foundations that determine whether an omnichannel commerce strategy will hold up under commercial pressure. Most brands have one or two. Very few have all four operating simultaneously.
1. Unified Customer Data
You cannot create a connected experience if you do not know who you are talking to. This sounds obvious, but the reality is that most brands hold customer data in multiple systems that do not communicate with each other. CRM data sits in one place. E-commerce transaction data sits in another. In-store purchase history, where it is captured at all, sits somewhere else entirely.
A customer data platform, or CDP, is the most common solution to this problem. The goal is a single customer record that is updated in real time across every touchpoint. When a customer who browsed a product on your app walks into a store, the store associate should, in principle, be able to see that context. When someone who bought in-store receives an email, it should not promote the product they already own.
The data infrastructure is not cheap, and it is not quick to implement. But without it, personalisation is a performance, not a reality.
2. Inventory Visibility Across All Channels
Inventory is where omnichannel promises most often break down. A customer orders online and selects in-store collection. The item is not available. Or they check stock on the website, drive to the store, and the shelf is empty. These are not edge cases. They are daily occurrences for brands that have not integrated their inventory systems.
Real-time inventory visibility, across warehouses, stores, and third-party fulfilment partners, is the operational backbone of omnichannel commerce. It enables ship-from-store, click-and-collect, and endless aisle capabilities. Without it, the customer experience is built on a promise the supply chain cannot keep.
This is also a commercial issue, not just a logistics one. Inventory that is siloed by channel creates inefficiency. Stock sitting in one location while demand exists in another is a margin problem as much as a customer experience problem.
3. Consistent Pricing and Promotion Logic
Nothing erodes customer trust faster than discovering that the same product is cheaper on Amazon than on your own website, or that the in-store promotion does not apply online. Pricing consistency across channels is not just a commercial hygiene issue. It is a brand credibility issue.
This is harder to manage than it sounds. Marketplace agreements often require pricing parity clauses. Retailer relationships involve negotiated promotional calendars that may not align with your direct channels. And internal teams managing different channels may not have visibility into each other’s promotional plans.
BCG has written extensively on how pricing strategy and go-to-market structure are deeply connected. The same principle applies in omnichannel commerce. If your pricing model is not coherent across channels, your go-to-market model is not coherent either.
4. Shared Measurement and Attribution
This is where the commercial model either supports or undermines the omnichannel strategy. If your e-commerce team is measured on online revenue and your retail team is measured on in-store revenue, neither has an incentive to support the other. The customer who researches online and buys in-store is invisible to both, or worse, contested by both.
I have seen this play out in large organisations where the digital and physical teams were in open competition for the same customer. The result was duplicated spend, contradictory messaging, and a customer experience that felt fragmented because it was fragmented. The measurement model was creating the dysfunction.
Omnichannel measurement requires a shared commercial framework. That might mean measuring customer lifetime value rather than channel-specific revenue. It might mean using matched market tests to understand the incremental contribution of each channel. It will certainly mean accepting that attribution models are incomplete, and building honest approximation into how you report performance rather than pretending the numbers are more precise than they are.
The Channel Mix Question
Omnichannel commerce does not mean being present on every channel. It means being present on the right channels and connecting them properly. The channel mix question is a strategic one, and it should be answered by where your customers actually spend their time and make their decisions, not by where your competitors happen to be.
Social commerce has grown significantly as a category. Platforms have built native checkout experiences that reduce friction between discovery and purchase. Creator-led commerce, where influencers drive direct sales through affiliate links or platform storefronts, is now a meaningful channel for certain categories. Creator-driven go-to-market strategies are particularly effective for seasonal and impulse categories where social proof matters at the point of discovery.
Marketplaces, particularly Amazon, remain dominant for product discovery and purchase in many categories. The tension for brands is that marketplace presence drives volume but often at the cost of margin, customer data, and brand control. A coherent omnichannel strategy has to decide how much of the customer relationship it is willing to outsource to a marketplace, and what it gets in return.
Physical retail, where it exists, is not a legacy channel. For many categories, the store is still where the majority of purchases happen. The question is how the physical experience connects to the digital one. Can a store associate access a customer’s online wishlist? Can a customer return an online purchase to any store? Can the store experience surface products that are out of stock locally but available online? These are the integration questions that determine whether physical retail is part of your omnichannel strategy or separate from it.
The Performance Marketing Trap in Omnichannel
Earlier in my career, I was heavily focused on lower-funnel performance. Conversion rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. These metrics felt clean and accountable. Over time, I came to understand that much of what performance marketing is credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer who searches for your brand name and clicks a paid search ad was already going to buy. You paid to intercept them at the last step of a experience that started somewhere else.
In omnichannel commerce, this bias towards lower-funnel measurement creates a specific problem. Brands optimise heavily for the channels that show up well in last-click or even data-driven attribution, typically paid search, retargeting, and email. They underinvest in the channels that drive awareness and consideration, the ones that put new customers into the funnel in the first place.
The result is a commerce strategy that is very efficient at capturing existing demand and very poor at creating new demand. You are converting the people who were already going to buy. You are not reaching the people who have never heard of you.
There is an analogy I come back to often. Think about a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is many times more likely to buy than someone who just browses the rail. The act of trying on changes the decision. The equivalent in omnichannel commerce is the upper-funnel touchpoint that creates a real connection with a new audience, a piece of content, a creator partnership, a brand campaign. That touchpoint is hard to measure precisely, but it is doing the work that makes the lower funnel possible. If you strip it out because it does not show up cleanly in your attribution model, you are optimising yourself into stagnation.
BCG’s work on brand and go-to-market strategy makes a similar point about the relationship between brand investment and commercial performance. The two are not in competition. They are sequential. Brand creates the conditions in which performance can work.
Omnichannel Commerce and the Growth Loop
The most commercially sustainable omnichannel strategies are built around growth loops rather than linear funnels. A growth loop is a system where the output of one activity becomes the input for the next. In commerce, this typically looks like: a customer makes a purchase, which generates a review or a social share, which creates social proof for the next customer, which drives another purchase.
The channel mix in an omnichannel strategy should be designed to accelerate these loops, not just to optimise individual channel performance. A customer who buys in-store and then shares on social is more valuable than their single transaction suggests. A customer who leaves a review on your e-commerce site is contributing to conversion rates for every subsequent visitor. These contributions are real, even if they are difficult to capture in a standard attribution model.
Understanding how customers actually behave across your channels, where they discover you, where they evaluate, where they purchase, and where they come back, is the foundation of a growth-oriented omnichannel strategy. Tools that capture behavioural signals across the funnel, including qualitative feedback, help build a more honest picture of what is actually driving commercial outcomes. Feedback loops that connect customer behaviour to commercial decisions are underused in most omnichannel programmes.
Growth hacking frameworks, when applied with commercial discipline rather than as a collection of tactics, can also surface channel combinations that are not obvious from standard reporting. Real-world growth hacking examples often reveal that the highest-performing channels are not the ones with the best individual metrics, but the ones that work best in combination with others.
What Good Omnichannel Execution Actually Looks Like
I have worked with brands at various stages of omnichannel maturity, from businesses that were managing every channel independently with no shared data to organisations that had invested heavily in integration and were starting to see the commercial returns. The difference in execution quality was visible not just in the customer experience but in the commercial results.
Brands that execute omnichannel well tend to share a few characteristics. First, they have made a deliberate decision about which channels they are going to connect, rather than trying to connect everything at once. Second, they have a shared commercial framework that does not reward channel-level competition. Third, they invest in the infrastructure, data, inventory, and measurement, before they invest heavily in channel expansion. And fourth, they treat the customer experience as the design constraint, not the technology or the org chart.
The brands that struggle tend to do the opposite. They expand into new channels before the existing ones are properly connected. They measure each channel in isolation and then wonder why the customer experience feels fragmented. They invest in technology without addressing the structural issues that the technology cannot solve. And they use the word “omnichannel” as a description of their ambition rather than their current state.
There is also a talent dimension that is rarely discussed. Omnichannel commerce requires people who can think across channels, not just within them. In my experience, these people are rare. Most channel specialists are excellent at optimising within their domain and poor at understanding how their decisions affect the broader system. Building or hiring for that cross-channel perspective is one of the most underrated investments a commerce organisation can make.
Understanding how omnichannel fits into your broader commercial growth model is worth spending time on. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit behind channel decisions, including how to sequence investment and how to connect channel strategy to business outcomes.
The Measurement Problem, Honestly
I judged the Effie Awards for a period, which gave me a view behind the curtain on how the industry thinks about marketing effectiveness. One thing that struck me was how often the most commercially successful campaigns were the ones that had been built around a clear business problem rather than a channel strategy. The channel mix was a consequence of the strategy, not the starting point.
Measurement in omnichannel commerce is genuinely difficult, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling something or has not tried to do it properly. The customer experience across channels is not linear. It does not follow the paths that attribution models assume. A customer might discover a product through a creator post, research it on your website, check availability in a store, buy online for in-store collection, and then leave a review. Each of those touchpoints contributed to the sale. None of the standard attribution models will give you an accurate picture of how.
The honest answer is that you need multiple measurement approaches operating in parallel. Last-click attribution tells you something about the final conversion step. Marketing mix modelling tells you something about the aggregate contribution of different channels over time. Incrementality testing tells you something about what would have happened without a specific channel or campaign. No single approach gives you the full picture. The combination, interpreted with commercial judgement rather than algorithmic certainty, gets you closer to the truth.
The worst outcome is false precision. Brands that trust a single attribution model completely and make major channel investment decisions based on it are not being rigorous. They are being credulous. Growth-oriented measurement frameworks tend to be more honest about this uncertainty and build it into the decision-making process rather than pretending it does not exist.
Video and content channels are increasingly part of the omnichannel mix, particularly for discovery and consideration. Research on video’s role in revenue generation points to significant untapped potential in channels that do not show up well in traditional commerce attribution but are doing meaningful work in the upper funnel.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
